Tornado Kick
Originally I had planned on using this clip of Bruce Lee as my reference material:
However I feel like this gave me a lot of freedom to work with the bottom half of the Jack Rig as there isn’t much movement from the lower half of the body and the view of the waste down is also obstructed by the fence.
I still wanted to do something martial arts themed with my animation so I began researching various types of kicks that I though would be fun to animate. Eventually I found a video of a Tornado kick and thought it would be a fun action to animate and because of the 360 degree turn involved in the kick, it would help me improve on my skills in Maya.
I found a tutorial on YouTube of how to be able to do a tornado kick, which is what I used as my reference material, as well as find an image by Jahirul Amin which really helped when making my animation.
Link to reference material:
The tutorial I found on YouTube did a very good job of explaining the action step by step, making it very clear to layout the motion of the animation and the reference image that i found online helped a lot with helping me mirror the positioning of the character throughout. I had to make the start and end of the animation up by myself a bit because in both the image reference that I had, the character is starting form a relaxed position with his arms by his side, where as I wanted my animation to start and end in a fighting position with his arms raised and fists clenched.
I also placed a normal square block down below my characters feet in order to help me keep the character centred and to have a reference as to where the character was going to land after they had finished the spinning kick.
I found both the rotation and the landing quite difficult in this animation, as the keyframes were difficult to space out correctly. I spent a lot of time slowing down the spin and adjusting the height of the jump to make it look realistic. The image reference I was using also made it difficult to see what position my character would be in from different views other than just the front too, so I found the tutorial video very useful when trying to get the view of kick at different angles.
I had the back bend downwards for when the character was landing back on the ground to show the weight of the jump and how the body would react when falling from the height that the character had jumped. I then went to the graph editor and copied over the first keyframes position to the end of the graph editor so that he would spring back into his original position after recovering from the impact.
Although this isn’t the most polished of my three animations, it was definitely my favourite to animate as I had a lot of freedom as to what animation I was doing. By picking something more exciting and more “action related” I feel like I was more enthusiastic during the animation process making the whole animation process more enjoyable.